From Strategy to Adoption: Building Trust in Sovereign Innovation

At Tech Show Frankfurt, Sarah Yvonne Elsser, Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at Tech Well Told, moderated a panel on how leaders move sovereign innovation from strategic intent into use. She was joined by Alexander Pessler, Co-Founder and Head of Content at Tech Well Told; Dr Ulrike Tagscherer, Managing Director at China Innovation Consulting; Ulrich Irnich, CIO Advisor EMEA at Salesforce; and Larissa Mikolaschek, Head of Tech at SEST digital.

The discussion followed the earlier impulse session, shifting from communication into how those ideas hold once organisations begin to act on them.

Sovereignty as Practical Control

The panel moved away from treating sovereignty as isolation from global technology markets, and toward how organisations understand and manage their dependencies.

“Most businesses run on infrastructure that does not belong to them.”

The question lies in how those dependencies are identified and handled, particularly where systems, suppliers or legal frameworks change.

“Sovereign innovation, in my opinion, is owning the key and being able to decide where your data sleeps, who walks in it, and when you move out, you don’t have to leave all the furniture behind.”

Control appears in terms of access, portability and the ability to act when conditions shift, rather than in ownership alone.

Regulation was addressed directly.

“We are world champion regulations, that’s for sure”

The discussion moved through how privacy, security and trust can be built into systems from the outset, rather than introduced as a final layer.

The distinction is present in how regulation is applied, whether as part of architecture and governance, or as something addressed after decisions have already been made.

From Discussion to Action

Execution returned repeatedly.

“We need to not only discuss things; we need to do things.”

The speakers used the analogy that “you can read ten books on riding a bike, and you cannot ride a bike.”

The contrast sits between planning and experience, particularly in environments where experimentation is required to understand how systems behave in practice. Learning takes place through use, rather than through documentation alone.

The discussion also moved through scenarios where sovereignty becomes visible in operational terms, including access to data and continued use of cloud services under changing legal or geopolitical conditions.

“Can Europe genuinely afford Sovereignty or can it afford not to?”

The framing extends beyond cost into dependency, where the absence of alternatives becomes relevant when systems or relationships change.

Middle Management as the Pressure Point

Adoption was described as uneven across organisations.

“Most of the time, it’s the middle management that has the most pain because they get all the targets from above.”

The pressure sits between strategic direction and operational delivery, where expectations, targets, and transformation initiatives converge.

The ability to trace how initiatives connect to outcomes becomes part of how that pressure is managed.

Cultural resistance was addressed through behaviour rather than labels.

“You can’t slide it out, memo it out, e-mail it out.”

Communication extends beyond announcements, requiring direct engagement across different levels of the organisation, where uncertainty, expectations, and roles are clarified through interaction rather than instruction.

Europe’s Position

The discussion closed by returning to Europe’s position, where capability exists across specialised sectors and industrial systems.

The challenge now lies in how those capabilities are connected, funded, and scaled across regions, rather than in their absence.

Across the session, sovereign innovation appears less constrained by technology than by how it is carried through organisations, where trust, control, and communication shape whether systems move from strategy into use.